Conti Bilong — full name Jacques Conti Bilong — was born in 1970 in Nkongsamba, Cameroon. Self-taught on drums from the age of thirteen, he was playing professionally in the clubs of Douala while still a teenager, working alongside guitarist and bandleader Ndedi Eyango, a fixture of the Cameroonian makossa scene. In 1990 he was taken on tour by Sam Fan Thomas, one of makossa's biggest stars, playing dates across Gabon and Kenya before crossing to the United States — an early, formative exposure to touring at an international level. Bilong has said the road work sharpened his ear for the rhythmic overlap between African music and Cuban, Brazilian, and Caribbean forms, an overlap he began deliberately folding into his own playing.

Through the 1990s Bilong built a second career as a session drummer, producer, and arranger inside Paris's large Cameroonian diaspora recording scene. Discogs credits him on some thirty releases from that period — almost entirely makossa and bikutsi records on the JPS Production label, for artists including Ben Decca, Longué Longué, Lapiro De Mbanga, Jean-Pierre Essome, and Dina Bell — work that lines up with an independent biographical note describing him as having established himself as a studio producer and arranger for Cameroonian artists including Dina Bell and Kotto Bass. By around 2000 he had relocated to Paris full-time, where he studied at the Bill Evans (Piano) Academy and at the Schola Cantorum de Paris, formal training layered on top of two decades of bandstand experience.

Paris also brought him into Manu Dibango's orbit. Bilong toured internationally with Dibango's Soul Makossa Band for more than fifteen years, a relationship that also produced a studio credit on Dibango's Lion of Africa (2007) and session work on the soundtrack to the animated film Kirikou et les bêtes sauvages. He has performed at Paris jazz rooms including Le Baiser Salé and Le Caveau des Oubliettes, and is named in multiple bio sources as a collaborator of Malian artists Oumou Sangaré and Cheick Tidiane Seck. In 2008 he became a founding member of Motivators, a Paris/London Afrobeat-funk-jazz collective built around producer Steve Laviers, playing drums opposite bassist Noël "Papa" Ekwabi on the group's Jobu (2008) and Boosters On (2010).

As a leader, Bilong's catalog opens with Bana (2005 on Discogs' dated CD release, though the album is frequently — and, on the evidence here, incorrectly — cited in French press as a 2009 title), a jazz-funk record built on makossa's rhythmic base and featuring bassist Étienne Mbappé. After a long gap he returned with It's Time! (2019), which brought in Paris-based American jazz vocalist Denise King as a featured guest, followed by a 2021 album — catalogued by Discogs as Mlango but marketed on Spotify and elsewhere under the title of its opening track, Miango. His fourth outing, Jazz Explorer (2023), was billed to the Conti Bilong Trio alongside pianist Eric Montigny and double bassist Gabriel Pierre, drawing its rhythms directly from Cameroonian bikutsi and makossa and drawing press comparisons to drummers Dave Weckl, Dennis Chambers, and Billy Cobham.

Most recently, Bilong stepped outside his own band entirely for Afro Baroque (2025), a duo album with the Jerusalem-born, blind pianist and synesthete Yakir Arbib, released on the UK label Elsden Music. The pairing began by accident: the two met for the first time in Paris in July 2023 and found an immediate rapport while playing Duke Ellington's "Caravan" together. The finished album — reviewed favorably by All About Jazz and Jazz Views/UK Jazz News — interleaves Central African rhythm with Baroque-style counterpoint and jazz improvisation, a genuinely unusual pairing that has given Bilong his widest critical notice to date outside the Cameroonian and francophone jazz press.

Bilong's playing is rooted in Cameroon's bikutsi and makossa rhythmic traditions, absorbed firsthand in the Douala club scene before he ever touched a jazz stage — a foundation he then layered with jazz vocabulary picked up through his years alongside Manu Dibango and his formal study at the Bill Evans Academy and Schola Cantorum. Press coverage of his own records has singled out Dave Weckl, Dennis Chambers, and Billy Cobham as touchstones for his drumming specifically, a fusion-jazz drum lineage that fits the way he treats groove as the load-bearing element of his arrangements rather than a backdrop to soloing. Afro Baroque pushed that instinct furthest afield yet, setting Central African percussion directly against European Baroque counterpoint in collaboration with Yakir Arbib — a deliberate collision of traditions rather than a blend, and the clearest evidence that Bilong treats jazz fusion as an open-ended, ongoing experiment rather than a settled style.